The “De” In “Decentralization” Stands For “Democracy”
There's a certain dark irony in watching tech billionaires who built their empires on the democratizing power of technology" now actively working to dismantle democratic institutions. The same figures who once championed connection and openness are now the architects of the most dangerous centralization of power in modern history.
This is why I wrote last month that Techdirt is now unavoidably a democracy blog. As I explained then:
This isn't about politics - it's about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible. For those in the tech industry who supported this administration thinking it would mean less regulation or more business friendly" policies: you've catastrophically misread the situation (which many people tried to warn you about). While overregulation (which, let's face it, we didn't really have) can be bad, it's nothing compared to the destruction of the stable institutional framework that allowed American innovation to thrive in the first place.
The connection between technology and democracy isn't just academic - it's existential. And nobody articulated this relationship more clearly than Taiwan's former digital minister Audrey Tang, who explained how Taiwan's democratic revolution and digital revolution were literally inseparable:
We're the first generation that enjoyed freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship. It arrived in 1989 with personal computers. For us, personal computer revolution and freedom of speech are the same thing. And our first Presidential election was in 1996 was also [the same time as] the popularization of the World Wide Web.... So the internet, democracy are not two things. They're one and the same thing in Taiwan.
That statement has stuck with me ever since I saw it back then, and I've been thinking about it even more lately.
What's particularly striking is how this perspective contrasts with our current moment - when many tech leaders have actively aligned themselves against democratic values and in favor of authoritarianism. The connection Tang identified isn't just philosophical; it's a practical blueprint for how technology and democracy can mutually reinforce each other.
But it's also a warning sign. When technologies designed to empower users lose that essential quality, they become perfect tools for authoritarians.
And my thinking has evolved somewhat on this. The internet remains an empowering force, but it requires constant work to keep it as such. This isn't a techno-solutionist argument. I'm reminded of Cory Doctorow's remembrance of John Perry Barlow, who was often accused of being a techno-solutionist optimist:
You don't found an organization like the Electronic Frontier Foundation because you are sanguine about the future of the internet: you do so because your hope for an amazing, open future is haunted by terror of a network suborned for the purposes of spying and control.
Indeed, EFF executive director Cindy Cohn's own remembrance of Barlow addresses the same issue, in talking about how Barlow believed that to bring us to a better world, you first had to envision what it could be like:
Barlow was trying to use the force of his will and mighty pen to bring a good future to pass in a world where it was far from certain. He was trying to get out ahead of what he knew would be the powerful forces against freedom online.
The internet is so powerful and important that many forces are trying to capture it for their own aims, against the will and interests of the public. Fighting against that bad future means understanding the better future.
We're seeing that in how the Mark Zuckerbergs, Jeff Bezoses, and Elon Musks of the world are looking to control large portions of the internet to increase their own power and influence. The more they control and the more they can limit user choice and options, the more power they have, but the less useful the internet is as an enabling tool.
The original power of the internet wasn't just about cool technology - it was about radical power redistribution. The web wasn't exciting because it had hyperlinks; it was exciting because suddenly anyone could publish without asking permission - in the same way that democracy gave anyone a say in governance. I wrote about this a few years ago, calling it the concept of the Eternal October, a play on the Eternal September - that moment in 1993 when AOL connected its users to the wider internet and forever changed its culture.
Internet old timers will point out the internet was never the same after that. Prior to that moment in 1993, as new users got on the internet, it was in a small enough group that old timers could impart some basic cultural knowledge, so even as newbies joined (often in a decent batch in September as entering college freshmen received their first internet access), they would make a mess of things for a few weeks, but the existing community could quickly help them acclimate and understand how to deal with things appropriately.
But as more and more people joined the internet, that cultural aspect became more and more difficult to maintain, and eventually into the void stepped the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Jeff Bezoses, and the Elon Musks. They provided ease of use" and a simpler system such that users didn't have to worry about config files or CSS or FTP. They could just do stuff.
And all it cost... was giving up some of that user's empowerment.
And then some more. And some more. Until, eventually, these systems that were originally about empowerment became something quite different altogether. They enabled very little self-empowerment, as more and more of the power and choice and control ended up in the hands of those billionaires. Not the users.
We gravitated to the internet and these services online because they originally did empower us. They initially did give us more freedom and power, and we saw it exercised in powerful ways. We saw movements, both big and small - the Arab Spring, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter - emerge from the internet, creating real and powerful social change.
But, again, the power that such social change unleashed only made controlling those systems more valuable. And thus: less user empowerment, more billionaire power. Each step of Cory Doctorow's Enshittification Curve is really about billionaires stripping away some of the empowerment the internet enabled, and handing it over to themselves.
People refer to it in many ways. They talk about monopolization. Or manipulation. But it's a drip... drip... drip... of the empowering parts of the internet slipping through our fingers and into the control of billionaires.
When I talk about getting past the learned helplessness" of users and giving choice back to users rather than the billionaires, that's what I'm talking about. Stemming the tide of this gradual shift in the empowering nature of the internet away from the users towards those who seek to control it.
It's also why I'm so concerned that so many are focused on either appealing to friendly" billionaires on their side to help, or to politicians to simply regulate" away the bad stuff. The problem with either of those is that it still is asking for power-hungry people to control the power of the internet. And hoping they won't abuse it and shift it to their own interests.
This is why decentralization isn't just a technical preference - it's a democratic imperative. My mantra Protocols, Not Platforms" isn't about technical elegance, but about fundamental power distribution. It's why I joined Bluesky's board, focusing on technological solutions that make user empowerment a built-in feature, not an afterthought - entire ecosystems designed to resist capture by those who would centralize power.
Because here's the fundamental truth: the internet is too powerful to be controlled by anyone. Putting that much power in the hands of a few billionaires or government officials is like giving a toddler a flamethrower - even with the best intentions, disaster is inevitable. The power must live at the ends of the networks with users, not at the center where the temptation for abuse becomes overwhelming.
And how does this tie back to democracy?
Democracy is the ultimate decentralized, people-empowering, disruptive technology. It was the system of government that moved the power of governance away from the center and to the users. Yes, it would often involve elements and entities that were centralized, but in a working democracy, those elements were reporting to the people, representing the people, rather than themselves.
So it's no coincidence that the authoritarian America we live in today, in which Donald Trump and Elon Musk seek to consolidate all power and control in one central authority, ignoring the balance of power, wrecking the checks and balances of three co-equal branches of government, and even threatening the actual system of democracy itself... is happening at the same time that the billionaires have similarly consolidated power of many of the largest internet services that we've used.
As these systems moved further down the enshittification curve, they began to feel less like they were empowering us, and more like they were using us to empower their owners. It's no coincidence that happened at the same time that these billionaires all lined up behind Donald Trump in support of an authoritarian vision.
Centralized systems are prone to takeover and abuse. And so that's what happens.
And this is why decentralization and democracy go hand in hand. It's why my belief in protocols over platforms is the same as my belief in why Techdirt has to be a democracy blog. They are not, as Tang said, two things.
They are the same thing. Both are fundamentally about resisting the concentration of power and placing agency and choice in the hands of individuals.
So when I advocate for decentralized systems like ATprotocol (and other protocols as well), I'm not just being a tech nerd excited about a cooler Twitter clone. I'm advocating for democracy itself - for a digital ecosystem that mirrors our democratic ideals by distributing power rather than concentrating it. It's about ensuring that the tools we use every day reflect our highest aspirations as a society, not just the financial interests of a handful of billionaires.
Some might argue that decentralization creates its own problems - fragmentation, potential for extremist echo chambers, or technical complexity that excludes average users.
These are valid concerns that deserve serious consideration. Decentralization without thoughtful design can create fragmented user experiences, communities without adequate safeguards, and tools that only technical elites can use. But here's the thing: these aren't arguments against decentralization itself - they're arguments for doing decentralization right. The same challenges existed for democracy itself (how to prevent majority tyranny, how to make governance accessible to average citizens). We address them through careful institutional design and by understanding incentives, not by abandoning democratic principles. Similarly, well-designed decentralized systems can incorporate moderation tools, accessibility features, and user protections without centralizing control.
If you believe in democratic values, then decentralized systems aren't optional - they're essential. The choice between centralized and decentralized technology isn't just a technical preference; it's increasingly a political stance. Do you want your digital life controlled by unaccountable billionaires or out-of-touch politicians, or do you want agency over your own experience? Do you want your social connections mediated by algorithms optimized for engagement, or do you want actual communities that serve your actual needs?
A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of editing the inaugural edition of the DWeb Digest, exploring the important role in decentralization. I've mentioned it repeatedly, but the piece that has stuck with me from that collection of articles was Danny O'Brien's article about terminal values and cognitive liberty.
In it, he explores the question of why do we care about decentralization." It cannot just be decentralization for the sake of decentralization. Decentralization itself is not the goal. It's a means to an end. But what end? He argues (quite convincingly) that the true value in decentralization is that it gives us back the power over our own minds and our own ideas:
Our own consciousness cannot be rented from others, or temporarily conceded to us, with built-in police or backdoors or hidden ad men. We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control: whether that's physically, or by using tools like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve our control when our data and processing power sits on others' hardware.
That's the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination. On top of that solid ground, we can build a society that's free and fair. And then we can have the ability and freedom to self-reflect, to talk, and to plot our better shared future together, free at last in our digital environment.
Decentralization isn't the end goal any more than a constitutional system is the end goal of democracy. Both are architectural choices that enable something more fundamental: human autonomy and collective self-determination. When we fight for decentralization, we're really fighting against a world where a handful of out-of-touch billionaires with rocket ships and God complexes get to decide how billions of people communicate, connect, and understand reality.
The internet was supposed to give everyone a voice. It briefly did. Now we need to reclaim that promise - not just because it would make for a better user experience (though it would), but because our collective ability to address existential challenges depends on it. Democracy cannot function when the channels of information and communication are controlled by a few unaccountable powers who can shape discourse to serve their interests.
At this moment when democracy faces its greatest existential threat in my lifetime, decentralized systems aren't just a technical preference - they're a democratic necessity. They represent our best path forward to reclaim power from those who would centralize control, and to resurrect the original promise of the internet as a tool for individual agency. This isn't just about creating better online experiences, though it will certainly do that. It's about fostering a society where democratic values permeate everything we do, where power flows from the many rather than the few, and where the tools we use reflect our deepest democratic aspirations.